2009 Hugo- and Nebula-award-winning biopunk science fiction. Some time
in the future, after peak oil and the crop blights, Thailand is one of
the few countries that's still hanging on. But in Bangkok various
factions are about to collide.

This is the sort of story we might have got if Gibson had chosen
to set Neuromancer entirely within Chiba, rather than moving the
plot out into the larger world. Everyone's a hustler, out for what
they can get; nobody can be trusted, because they'll stab you in the
back as soon as they see any slight advantage. If humans actually
worked like this we'd never have had cities in the first place, or
probably even agriculture.

Oh, and there's one exception to that: the principal female character,
who's a genetically engineered prostitute, degraded and raped for show
every night. Because that's what female characters are for in *punk
books. All right, I already thought that rape to establish sympathy
and motivation was an overused trope in books and film; this is
particularly true when the camera, or the writer, lingers on the
details. Like violent comics in the Action mould, they say that this
nastiness is being done by bad and nasty people, so it's a cautionary
tale that you can enjoy without being a bad person yourself. Look a
little closer…

And of course she's Japanese, with geisha-style mannerisms and perfect
skin, and a hidden capacity for violence. Because this whole damn book
is about how the Orientals are Not Like Us; none of the Thai
characters is at all sympathetic, and the narrative focus is largely
on an American expatriate. It's westerners who provide all the
impulses to change that get things moving (for good or ill, mostly
ill); there are Thai details painted in, but they don't drive the
plot, and post-collapse Bangkok could just as easily have been any
other post-collapse city. Cultural appropriation is the whole premise:
look at these weird foreigners, aren't they strange and hidebound, I'm
so glad I'm an American who just wants to make money.

Oh, and there are ghosts that everyone agrees are real and they can
talk to. No, no explanation, why would you expect one in what's
otherwise trying to present itself as a hard-SF book?

The technological background is potentially interesting: there's no
oil (for reasons never explained, but fair enough), and coal is very
limited, and so almost everything has to run on muscle power. (We deal
with nuclear, solar, wind, wave, and other sources of power by
ignoring their existence.) For another reason never explained, this
means that there's no electricity either: people light their houses
with methane-burning lamps, small inefficient individual combustors
fed by gas bottles that have to be hauled in, rather than having a
large efficient methane-burning power plant and using electrical power
to feed something a bit better than a gas flame. Even though they
supposedly care desperately about total carbon emissions.

This breaks as soon as you poke it. A factory is powered by engineered
"megodonts" (which are like elephants but even bigger and cooler)… but
if you can feed an elephant, you can extract energy from that fodder
crop and turn it into electricity with much higher efficiency. (And
human muscles are used for all sorts of tasks, which is similarly
inefficient.) "Kink-springs" store energy to turn fans and drive
scooters, and of course to power guns.

"I've got kink-springs the size of my fist that hold a gigajoule of
power. Quadruple the capacity-weight ratio of any other spring on
the market. […] We haven't had power this portable since gasoline."

Gasoline gives you about 44 MJ/kg. You're claiming something like
twenty times that energy density (apparently without realising you've
done it), just so that you can use a cool word like "gigajoule" at the
same time as cashing in on the steampunk æsthetic.

So it's style over substance, and the style is tedious grim
hopelessness. Many people loved this book, but I found the grinding
stupidity and selfishness too much, and the Thai setting
self-indulgent and desperately prone to exoticisation of the oriental.

The joint winner of the 2009 Hugo was China Miéville's The City and
the City; many people also like Miéville, but I find his writing
gratuitously unpleasant in much the same manner as Bacigalupi's and I
haven't read this one. Other nominees, none of which I've read either,
were Cherie Priest's Boneshaker, Robert J. Sawyer's Wake,
Catherynne M. Valente's Palimpsest and Robert Charles Wilson's Julian
Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America.

I read Bacigalupi's The Water Knife and enjoyed it (it's a SW America gone to shit), but avoided The Windup Girl because of the genetically engineered prostitute. The supporting character prostitute in The Water Knife is more real world - drug addict and delusionally hoping a rich client will like her enough to marry her.

Robert Sawyer's Wake is a lot of fun. I heartily disagree with his bicameral mind theory, but the trilogy is uplifting and full of niceness and people trying to do the right thing.

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